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The Academy of American Poets is the largest membership-based nonprofit organization fostering an appreciation for contemporary poetry and supporting American poets. For over three generations, the Academy has connected millions of people to great poetry through programs such as National Poetry Month, the largest literary celebration in the world; Poets.org, the Academy’s popular website; American Poets, a biannual literary journal; and an annual series of poetry readings and special events. Since its founding, the Academy has awarded more money to poets than any other organization.

Thomas Hardy, the son of a stonemason, was born in Dorset, England, on June 2, 1840. He trained as an architect and worked in London and Dorset for ten years. Hardy began his writing career as a novelist, publishing Desperate Remedies (Tinsley Brothers) in 1871, and was soon successful enough to leave the field of architecture for writing. His novels Tess of the D'Urbervilles (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1891) and Jude the Obscure (Osgood McIlvaine & Co., 1895), which are considered literary classics today, received negative reviews upon publication and Hardy was criticized for being too pessimistic and preoccupied with sex. He left fiction writing for poetry, and published eight collections, including Poems of the Past and the Present (Harper & Bros., 1902) and Satires of Circumstance (Macmillan, 1914).

Hardy's poetry explores a fatalist outlook against the dark, rugged landscape of his native Dorset. He rejected the Victorian belief in a benevolent God, and much of his poetry reads as a sardonic lament on the bleakness of the human condition. A traditionalist in technique, he nevertheless forged a highly original style, combining rough-hewn rhythms and colloquial diction with an extraordinary variety of meters and stanzaic forms. A significant influence on later poets (including Frost, Auden, Dylan Thomas, and Philip Larkin), his influence has increased during the course of the century, offering an alternative—more down-to-earth, less rhetorical—to the more mystical and aristocratic precedent of Yeats. Thomas Hardy died on January 11, 1928.

The Interloper

There are three folk driving in a quaint old chaise,And the cliff-side track looks green and fair;I view them talking in quiet gleeAs they drop down towards the puffins' lair By the roughest of ways;But another with the three rides on, I see, Whom I like not to be there!

No: it's not anybody you think of. NextA dwelling appears by a slow sweet streamWhere two sit happily and half in the dark:They read, helped out by a frail-wick'd gleam, Some rhythmic text;But one sits with them whom they don't mark, One I'm wishing could not be there.

No: not whom you knew and name. And nowI discern gay diners in a mansion-place,And the guests dropping wit—pert, prim, or choice,And the hostess's tender and laughing face, And the host's bland brow;But I cannot help hearing a hollow voice, And I'd fain not hear it there.

No: it's not from the stranger you once met. Ah,Yet a goodlier scene than that succeeds;People on a lawn—quite a crowd of them. Yes,And they chatter and ramble as fancy leads; And they say, 'Hurrah!'To a blithe speech made; save one, mirthless, Who ought not to be there.

Nay: it's not the pale Form your imagings raise,That waits on us all at a destined time,It is not the Fourth Figure the Furnace showed;O that it were such a shape sublime In these latter days!It is that under which best lives corrode; Would, would it could not be there!

This poem is in the public domain.

This poem is in the public domain.

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy, whose books include Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, was one of the most influentual novelists and poets of England's Victorian era.

We waited for the sun
To break its cloudy prison
(For day was not yet done,
And night still unbegun)
Leaning by the dial.
After many a trial—
We all silent there—
It burst as new-arisen,
Throwing a shade to where
Time travelled at that minute.
Little saw we in it,
But this much I know,
Of lookers on that shade

Orion swung southward aslant Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned, The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant With the heather that twitched in the wind;But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these,